A leading magazine devoted to science journalism says American homeschoolers are being left behind and that their parents should be investigated and have to pass a background check in order to educate their own children at home.
Scientific American, in its May issue, says “With few states tracking who is being homeschooled and what they are learning, an untold number of U.S. children are at risk of a poor education or even abuse.”
The magazine shows alarm that parents are pulling their children out of government schools at an increasing rate. It says that in 2019, nearly 3% of U.S. children — 1.5 million — were being homeschooled.
“No one knows by how much, and that is part of the problem. Homeschooling is barely tracked or regulated in the U.S. But children deserve a safe and robust education, whether they attend a traditional school or are educated at home,” the magazine argues.
“This number, calculated from a nationwide survey, is surely an undercount because the homeschooling population is notoriously hard to survey, and more children have been homeschooled since the COVID pandemic began. Eleven states do not require parents to inform anyone that they are homeschooling a child, and in most of the country, once a child has exited the traditional schoolroom environment, no one checks to ensure they are receiving an education at all,” Scientific American says.
Alaska has the highest percentage of homeschool students in the nation, with over 15.4% of families homeschooling their children. Alaska is followed by Idaho at 8.9%, Tennessee at 8.5%, and Oklahoma at 8.3%.
The magazine wants government oversight on homeschool families, just in case children are being abused. However, the magazine offers no evidence to support such an overreach by the federal government into families’ lives. Nor does the magazine address the constitutionality of such an action; the Department of Education is a relatively new federal agency, created during the Carter Administration and a growing number of conservatives believe the department should be dismantled due to the quality of public education having declined ever since the department was created and because it is skimming money that could be used for schools.
Scientific American argues that homeschool students aren’t required to take assessments that students who attend government schools take.
“This makes sense, since the individualized learning environment afforded to homeschool students lends itself to more flexible and diverse assessment modalities. While standardized tests might be the most efficient way for teachers to measure the content knowledge of a class of 25 students, a written analysis based on a recent visit to a museum might be a more meaningful demonstration of knowledge for a homeschool student,” says the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
View Alaska’s homeschool subject proficiency data here.
“What doesn’t make sense, however, is the editors’ argument that the practice of exempting homeschool students from taking the same types of assessments as their peers in a classroom setting ‘enables educational neglect that can have long-lasting consequences for a child’s development.’ This is an unscientific logical fallacy with harmful consequences, including misleading the public about the reality of homeschooling. While neglecting a child’s education is certain to have a negative impact on his or her development, exempting a homeschool child from taking standardized assessments is not a form of educational neglect,” the policy group writes, in a pointed critique of the magazine.
Scientific American also smeared Christians in its opinion column, saying that “some Christian homeschooling curricula teach Young Earth Creationism instead of evolution. Other curricula describe slavery as ‘Black immigration’ or extol the virtues of Nazism.”
While it’s true that homeschool learning can be tailored and individualized to reflect a family’s deeply held values, one main reason that more families are choosing it as an option for their children is because during the Covid pandemic, while students were learning at home, parents became concerned about the concepts their children were being taught, especially when those things were in conflict with family values, such as non-scientific gender identity ideology and anti-Christian dogma.
The science magazine, which has been published for 178 years, prescribes federal intervention and monitoring of homeschool families:
“It is clear that homeschooling will continue to lack accountability for outcomes or even basic safety in most states. But federal mandates for reporting and assessment to protect children don’t need to be onerous. For example, homeschool parents could be required to pass an initial background check, as every state requires for all K–12 teachers. Homeschool instructors could be required to submit documents every year to their local school district or to a state agency to show that their children are learning.”
